Are you getting better?

[Happycamper374]

Presumably, the more we play the better we get. This is a question to all those who have the means to answer it. More of a stop and think rhetorical type thing. Although I would like some answer from those with the numbers to back it up.

How do you know you are getting better? What quantifies "better"?

For those of you who play huge volumes of STT's, look at your ROI graph. It should be a little wiggly line, and at the center of this line should be your true ROI. Does it have a positive slope? Over the last 3,000 tournaments, has it moved from 22% to 25%? 22% to 23%? 22% to 20%? What about over the last 10 thousand? Does this even matter?

I'm partly asking this out of curiousity to see if anybody notices this in their stats, and partly because I'm feeling philosophical at the moment.

Some of us may be content at a plateau in our play. This may be because we are raking in a cool $100/hr and we dont see a need to try and improve.(I'm not one of those people /images/graemlins/smile.gif )We've found the winning strategy and there's nothing more to it.

Isn't the true goal, at least for those of us who play because we enjoy it, to get better and better? To see just how good we can be? The day when I think I no longer have anything to improve is the day I quit poker forever. And I never plan on quitting...

[1C5]

I try not to look at my ROI anymore. I just look at my bankroll every once in a while and buy things sometimes.

I am happier.

[sofere]

I don't have to look at my ROI to know that I am better than I was 6 months ago...back then, I thought "soooted" was spelled "suited" and would say "I thought he was bluffing" in chat after reraising all-in in level 1 with bottom pair.

[stupidsucker]

Perhaps one of the largest problems in poker is the fact that it takes a lonnnnnnnnngggg time to really see if a tiny change makes a difference sometimes.

The only factual refernce we have is ITM and RoI...I think that a 25% roi player can improve to a 30% roi player and not even notice a difference after as many as 5k games. In the corse of playing any given set long enough to compare your game has already changed since the day you started the set and thus impossible to draw any real conclusion.

[Benholio]

To add to what stupidsucker says, even if you could know your exact ROI at any given time, it wouldn't prove whether you are improving/getting worse. ROI is a relative stat. You could have an ROI graph that starts at 30% and slowly declines to 20% and still be constantly imrpoving (and not getting unlucky, either). Game conditions change.

The best thing to do is keep analyzing your own play, and having others analyze it as well. Maybe take a sample of x tourneys per week, mark how many easily identifiable errors you made, and post hands for the questionable plays. If you kept a journal of this, you could see if you are making fewer errors and questionable plays. (I am way too lazy do this)

I think everyone focuses on understanding what the correct play is, which is obviously important, but they should also focus on actually MAKING that play every time. For various reasons (multi-tabling confusion, tilt, good mood, bad mood), we all make plays that we immediately know are wrong, and dismiss them.

"I shouldn't call with this, but screw it"
"I should probably push here *clicks fold*"

I think I rambled a bit off-topic, but my point is that seeing how often you make the right play is a better indicator of your skill/performance than your ROI is.

[Mr_J]

I'm getting more experienced, but I haven't been doing anything to improve my game (I'm doing alot of rereading today). Right now I think the way I can improve most is from recognizing betting tendencies.

So I haven't been trying to improve ROI, just increase the number of tables I play. Sometime in the next week or 2 I'll start 8-12 tabling or move to the $55s. Either way, I'm really going to look to improve when I hit the $55s (gotta make sure the move is worthwhile).

[The Student]

Good question, and one that I think people lose track of at times. Although, I'm not sure that everyone really cares to get better, some just care to see their bankroll/roi/itm numbers rise.

For me, it's not a question that I can answer definitively. All I can say is that I know that I am thinking at higher levels and juggling many more variables as I play a SNG than I was a few months ago. When I started reading this forum some months ago, I would play a SNG and just play the cards and occassionally the players (at the $5.50s). Now, I'm playing a few SNGs at once ($11/$22 mix) and thinking of my cards, the players, betting patterns, ICM, FE, Eastbay's push/fold numbers, pot odds, and a couple other things too. Bottom line is that I'm much happier with my game right now than I was a few months ago. I feel like I am a better player, but more importantly, I'm enjoying the game more because I'm more mentally challenged in the game - and that's one of the reasons that I love poker, the fact that I can become totally mentally absorbed by the game.

Am I better than I was before? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm definitely loving the game even more nowadays.

ts-

[Blarg]

People have said measuring quantitative differences in your skill level can be tough, and I'd have to agree. I just hope to be at the point soon where they even matter.

I'm very new to this and I'm measuring my skill increases by my exposure to new concepts and slowly increased understanding of them, as well as my ability to not just parrot mentally what I read but feel I can put it into my own words and really own the thoughts personally -- be comfortable with them and feel more like they're tools than obstacles.

At this point, that is happening constantly, as the whole subject of SNG's is basically so new to me. When I said above that I hoped to get to the point where numbers mattered, I meant that I wanted to get to the point where I felt I had major concepts pretty well wired and was able to think clearly about the more and more subtleties, so that my learning curve might actually be slowing down because of the successful integration of new knowledge into my play. That will mean I've reached some sort of a foundation I can spring from in order to get even better. Right now I'm just trying to build an elementary foundation and even see what the foundations really are. Numbers don't mean too much to me at this point; I can't wait until my biggest problem is not knowing what the hell is going on, or even what to do about it, but whether I can squeeze out tiny incremental advantages somewhere that I've been overlooking.

[The Yugoslavian]

Yes.

But it is always very difficult to tell with poker...

This is one of the biggest challenges of poker actually.

Yugoslav